Fiction, Genre, and the Epistemology of “Real”

“Of course it’s happening in your head… but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” - Dumbledore

Justice argues that side-stepping the question of belief in studying medieval miracle narratives results in the construction of medieval subjects as caricatured idiots or sinister charlatans who “speak either in a cynical and nearly sociopathic detachment from the truth-content of their words, or in a nearly delusional bondage to interests they do not even recognize as the source of those words” (11). After taking apart this claim that modern medievalist scholarship imputes either delusion or sociopathy onto medieval writers, we asked ourselves why Justice’s scoldings seemed both to ring a bit true and to miss the mark. On the one hand, he makes important points about the dangers of projecting modern ideas about “truth” onto medieval writers, while at the same time he appears to do exactly that when he imagines only two possible implications of modern scholars’ choice not to take up questions of belief on his terms. We easily identified a third possibility, which is that acknowledging the “imaginariness” of hagiographical narrative need not necessarily constitute an accusation of either fraud or idiocy. In fact, only if we impute to medieval writers our own epistemology of “real”--which posits a line between “empirical” and “imaginary” and privileges the material over the imaginary as “real”--does it follow that they must either be deluded or attempting to delude others. Considering the possibility of an epistemological conception of truth with different boundaries from our own seems to offer a resolution.

We suspect that it is the limitations of our own modern taxonomies of truth and “reality” which make it difficult for us to imagine a writer of miracle narratives who is neither maliciously lying nor naively credulous. Using such rigid categories of “real” and “not real” privileges one interpretation of the texts over other interpretations. This is problematic for us as scholars and teachers of literature, because assuming that medieval visionaries could only have been either delusional or fraudulent can color how modern readers approach and interpret their writing. Miracles are not “real” in a material sense and therefore not real by our modern “material-trumps-imaginary” test of realness, but the same test and hierarchical binary between material and imagination did not necessarily burden medieval writers. We wonder if perhaps it’s just our post-Enlightenment bias that makes us (or rather, Justice) think of it as an insult to point out that something is “only” imaginary.

Recognizing that this bias is problematic raises questions about how we taxonomize literature based on its adherence to a particular conception of the “real.” Fantasy, realistic fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, memoir, history: all of these terms are freighted with assumptions about the nature of truth and what is or is not “real.” And so we found ourselves focused on the implications of Justice’s argument for genre. And we were pretty excited.

Silas Marner

George Eliot’s work often walks the line between realism and romanticism, and Silas Marner is no exception.  On one hand, Kathryn Hughes can write that the book “is actually intent on showing a particular patch of the Warwickshire countryside at a precise historical moment.  And from remarks made both by the narrator and Squire Cass, it is clear that the historical moment occurs during the French Wars of 1793-1815” (185).  On the other hand,  Jonathan Quick is able to argue that in Silas Marner, Eliot “is making a deliberate effort to modify, even to abandon, the insistent work-a-day realism that obtained in her previous work” (288).

Both critics are right.  The town of Raveloe is small, provincial, and gritty, and the people who live there have complex characters and motivations.  Yet unlikely things happen there: an orphaned girl wanders into Silas’s home and saves him from despair, the gold that was stolen from Silas reappears when it will do him the most good.  Characters generally get their happily-ever-afters, and they attribute their happiness to God.  For some reason, however, critics do not want to acknowledge that Silas Marner can do both things, be in both places at once; the wealth of articles focused on determining “the genre of Silas Marner” attests to that.

Declaring that Silas Marner is either realism or romanticism, however, is limiting.  Choosing a side in the debate means pitting the aspects of the novel against each other, choosing one set to focus on (that is worth focusing on).  Even introducing the question of whether Silas Marner is realism or romanticism is akin to asking whether the story is realistic and is potentially a road to dismissing the elements that are not.  Yet the point of the novel may be that all its aspects are real, just in different ways, because choosing to believe the child you found on the road is a gift from God to give your life purpose does give your life purpose—whether or not a God was involved.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Pale Horse, Pale Rider is referenced in a myriad of different genres. It is considered by some to be a memoir, although the author, Katherine Anne Porter, declared it not a memoir, despite the obvious parallels to her own life. Because of its modest length, it is frequently referred to as a novella. Porter detested the word ‘novella’, calling it a "slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything." Commonly, the title “historical novel” accompanies descriptions of the text because of its setting in the late WWI era, specifically 1918, during the last wave of influenza pandemic that swept the world. Porter preferred “short novel” when readers insisted on placing her book in a pigeonhole.

Does it matter how one describes a work when presenting it to a reader? Does a ‘pigeonhole’ affect the mindset with which a reader enters into the text? I suppose that if I referenced Pale Horse as a novella—and the reader channeled Porter and imagined a “slack, boneless, affected” book—I could anticipate a significant negative coloring of the work in the reader’s mind. But if I called it a “historical novel,” I might appeal to a reader hoping for an inventive novel resting firmly on non-fiction bones.  Call it “memoir,” and a different reader altogether would probably show up, someone hoping for an interior glimpse into the author’s world, preferably an author with a stimulating life to relate.

The words in the book stay the same; the title of the work and the author of the work remain the same. The only thing that changes is the lens through which we ask the reader to frame the story. But in specifying a certain lens, perhaps we do to Pale Horse what Justice says interpreters of medieval miracle stories do: we subtly influence what we want the reader to see in the text. Now, in 2014, centuries after the Middle Ages and decades after the 1918 pandemic, we must use caution in focusing our spectacles on either era and calling what we see “truth.”

Frankenstein

It’s difficult to map these ideas about genre perfectly onto Frankenstein, but they certainly apply. The novel’s place in the category “Romantic literature” is more firmly fixed than Silas Marner’s, perhaps, but it also stakes a claim on the “realistic fiction” label, and it’s hard to talk about Frankenstein and genre without discussing the unresolved critical question of whether or not the novel is “science fiction.” The controversy lies partly in the complete lack of “science” in Shelley’s fictional narrative. She does not include laboratory scenes or attempt to describe Victor Frankenstein actually doing the science. The appearance of the creature is dependent upon scientific practices that Mary Shelley does not even try to reproduce textually. The absence of science in the narrative means that a reader cannot debunk it action by action but rather can only doubt the probability of the result. Shelley (to borrow Katherine’s phrasing from last week) has not attempted to replicate science in the sense of “what is” but rather as a “what if”. In this sense, despite the novel’s lack of representations of scientific practices (fictional or otherwise), it bears some marks of belonging within the science fiction category.

Today, science fiction and fantasy are both discussed critically under the umbrella term “speculative fiction,” which denotes the un-real-ness of “fiction” (a term that otherwise lumps together literary prose with outright lies) as well as the culturally sanctioned subset of imaginative work known as “speculation.” Literary fiction is an exceptional category carved out as a safe space in which narratives that are not “real” in an empirical sense but which we nonetheless embrace for their potential to represent the real. We also embrace fiction that breaks from a strictly representative mode (realistic fiction) and moves into a mode of imaginary work that does not represent materially-possible scenarios but rather speculates on impossible but interesting alternatives. I wonder if Frankenstein’s contested claim to the title of “first science fiction novel” has more to do with our conceptions of “science” (it’s material, empirically observable, and you do it with tools) and “fiction” (it didn’t happen like this, but what if…) than with Shelley’s motivations. I suspect that a similar explanation applies to Justice’s examples.

Final answer:

Our takeaway from Justice’s article is that we should take care to remove our 21st-century lenses when introducing a text to readers (or when reading about a text ourselves prior to delving into the material) to avoid the epistemological pitfalls he describes. We need to avoid the “durable doublet” with the “curious, asymmetrical relation” that he wraps his thoughts around. We should be neither didactic in our approach (trying to explain away a story by rationalizing ‘why’ the author tells the story) nor put a perceptual spin on a piece (indicating that the author wrote what he wrote because he had no deeper knowledge that might have clarified his piece had he been more educated.) Rather, we should be open to all considerations of a text, view it from multiple points, give the text latitude without forcing it into whichever box we find fitting on a particular day or in a particular era (forgive us--we know we are forcing this article into an ENL 200 box for the sake of this blog post).  When we avoid temporally- or culturally-bound labels, avoid declarations of what is real as if that signifier is fixed, we can read texts from the past with proper respect to a time and place we may never fully understand.

Works Cited

Hughes, Kathryn.  Afterword. Silas Marner. By George Eliot. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. 184-190. Print.

Quick, Jonathan R. Silas Marner as Romance: The Example of Hawthorne. Nineteenth Century Fiction. Vol. 29, No. 3 (Dec., 1974), pp. 287-298

Briana Wagner, Sally Lochowski Tanaka, Jessica Gray

Shelley, Stoker, Chen, Derrida, The Walking Dead comics, and a book that snarls and bites

I found Chen’s “Toxic Animacies” to be a promising point of entry for teaching Shelley’s Frankenstein. I can see assigning this piece in a course on monsters and monstrosity (a course I can’t wait to design). The theme of invasion, the potential for toxicity to breach boundaries of imagined purity and security, opens the way for a discussion of how such infiltrations are figured in literature and what they might say about our ideas of what constitutes a monstrous threat—and, conversely, what constitutes purity.

Chen posits that “the queerest bioterrorist is the one who is remote, racialized ‘otherwise,’ and hybrid” (271). I would add to this list “fecund.” The danger of reproduction, replication, contagion, or contamination beyond the point of the initial breach seems to be ubiquitous in the representations of such monstrous threats (e.g., the default mode of dietary and other environmental toxins is to "cause cancer" rather than, say, make your heart stop). Certainly some prominent literary and film monsters illustrate this fertile potential: werewolves, vampires, and zombies alike are able to infect others—thus reproducing themselves and perpetuating the bio-not-bio-threat. Interestingly, in Frankenstein one of the most salient examples of a threat to sacred, pure domestic safe zone occurs after Victor refuses to continue his work on the female mate the creature has demanded. The creature vows to visit Victor on his wedding night, at which point he murders Victor’s bride in her bed. Both injury and revenge center upon marital—and potentially reproductive—relations.

The reproductive potential skirted around in this revenge plot suggests an interesting parallel between the Original Threat to correct life-giving (the creation of the monster) and the Ultimate Threat (the monster reproducing). I found this line fascinating and would probably use it as a starting point for a group discussion: “The mediation of [toxins] in and around categories of life [. . .] undoes lead’s deadness by reanimating it” (272). I would be interested in helping the students parse and think through this line. What does Chen mean by “mediating”? What does it mean to offer both “in” and “around” as approaches to “categories of life”? And most importantly, why “reanimating” rather than simply “animating”? This line in particular offers a series of potentially productive stumbling blocks to prevent too quickly accepting an easy, binary conception of life/not-life. It’s in this line where I think Chen’s argument challenges itself.

Not only does Chen's article privilege animacy over life in considering the personified toxic threat, it suggests that its life-status is irrelevant: “Toxins sometimes bear the threat of death to a protected life, but whether or not they ‘are’ alive is not the issue” (272). I’m not so sure. It might not always be at issue, but on the other hand, it’s striking to note how many figures of invasion—especially contagious invasion—involve an unstable, mutable boundary between life and non-life. I am thinking here of zombies, vampires, and of course the animate, intelligent creature Victor Frankenstein fashioned from dead tissues. These threats are absolutely queered; they occupy a third space along the alive/not-alive binary. They are also hybrid in the agent/object sense: they are both victim and perpetrator, both poisoned and poison.

At this point I would produce a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) dramatically from within the folds of my black satin cloak and read to the students the passage about the need for vampires (the unholy undead) to sleep in consecrated earth. And as a fun prank, I would then assign Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy”! Right? Perhaps not, but I would certainly consider it as a reading for any grad students who might be taking a cross-listed version of this monstrously exciting class.

On Context and Monstrosity

Claire Colebrook sets forth as the “necessary problem of context” the suggestion that “a text cannot be contained within some context of safe, historical, and guaranteed astute reading” (702).  The article points to potential disruptions and disconnects between readers and textual “meaning” stemming from temporal displacement (specifically the foreign-ness to today’s students of some canonical texts’ language), spatial or cultural distance (as in the case of “highly local” references in music lyrics), and other examples of what she calls “contextual decay” (702). Colebrook even considers the question of what kinds of meaning can inhere in a text that not only has moved beyond its original context but has been removed from all of remotely familiar or imaginable backdrops. Imagining a scenario in which abstract, future beings encounter human text archives in “radically inhuman contexts” brought on by the decline of literacy or the “disappearance of all reading animals,” Colebrook stresses the necessity of considering texts beyond their immediate, or even relatable, contexts (703).

In unpacking the theoretical and historical context of the concept context, Colebrook turns to the study of language itself, pointing out that accounting for the origin of language permits a more grounded “empirico-transcendental approach” to understanding its structure:

Language […] emerges because man is an animal whose species requires him to enter into social relations; languages differ but have the same underlying imperative of allowing man to emerge as a being whose relation to his environs requires some organizing structure. Man knows himself only as he appears to himself through these structures. The fact that there are structures […] is transcendental; but the specific form these structures take is empirical, and we know the transcendental (or life) only as it appears in its specific form. (713)

In other words, we understand the structure of language as a mediator between “man” and “his environs” only in and through the specific iteration of this structure that is available to us and through which we understand ourselves--and our own position within the context of that structure. Reading these lines with an eye toward a dialogue between this article and Shelley’s Frankenstein prompted me to revisit the scene in which the Creature relates the story of his time in the forest—the “original era of [his] being” and his attempts to account for himself within the social structure (Shelley 79).

The novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, announces an intertextual link to the story of the invention of writing, which is to say, the coming into being of the material text as a body separate from the body that engenders it (as distinct from speech). With this in mind, I brought Colebrook’s perspective on the “empirico-transcendental approach” to language and context to bear on the Creature’s tale of his beginnings (713). He tells of gradually mastering his senses, finding food and shelter, and educating himself by way of eavesdropping, all while remaining outside the social order—“shut out from intercourse” and struggling to make sense of himself: “But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses [. . .] I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I?” (97). Absent the benefit of known relationships by which to triangulate his position within the structure, he cannot read himself.

An attempt to locate his own position within the larger social sphere fails as well, as the Creature learns details of “the strange system of human society” and finds that its ordered structure holds no place for him: “I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood. [. . .] And what was I? I was not even of the same nature as man. [. . .] When I looked around, I saw and heard none like me. Was I then a monster?” (96). Especially in light of the allusion to Prometheus and the possibility of the Creature as an analogue of the written text (and accordingly cobbled together from borrowed parts), I can’t help but read this moment partly in terms of the struggle to fix meaning that is not entirely contingent upon context.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Ed. Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Primary Text: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)



Excerpts from Sir Walter Scott's review in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine:

"[Supernatural] fiction has been sometimes applied to the purposes of political satire, and sometimes to the general illustration of the powers and workings of the human mind. Swift, Bergerac, and others, have employed it for the former purpose, and a good illustration of the latter is the well known Saint Leon of William Godwin. In this latter work, assuming the possibility of the transmutation of metals, and of the elixir vitae, the author has deduced, in the course of his narrative, the probable consequences of the possession of such secrets upon the fortunes and mind of him who might enjoy them. Frankenstein is a novel upon the same plan with Saint Leon; it is said to be written by Mr Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, if we are rightly informed, is son-in-law to Mr Godwin; and it is inscribed to that ingenious author.

[. . . ]

"Upon the whole, the work impresses us with a high idea of the author's original genius and happy power of expression. We shall be delighted to hear that he has aspired to the paullo majorica; and, in the meantime, congratulate our readers upon a novel which excites new reflections and untried sources of emotion. If Gray's definition of Paradise, to lie on a couch, namely, and read new novels, come any thing near truth, no small praise is due to him, who, like the author of Frankenstein, has enlarged the sphere of that fascinating enjoyment."

Scott, Walter. Remarks on Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, a novel. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 2 (20 March/1 April 1818): 613-620. Rpt. in Romantic Circles. Web. 4 Oct. 2014.